


The Things We Do for Love

by black_hat_with_bells



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Twisted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-02
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 21:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_hat_with_bells/pseuds/black_hat_with_bells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: AU- Gabriel is a Petrilli. He and Elle are childhood best friends, she starts dating Peter instead, and he can't stand it. Things take a dark turn as he proves to Elle who she really belongs with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Things We Do for Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [superkappa](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=superkappa).



Gabriel met her in the rain.

He should have considered it a bad sign, all things considered.

He had taken shelter outside in the storm to avoid the peace inside the house. That horrible, wretched peace that made his imperfection so resoundingly loud. Mr. Bishop sat their nice couch, sipping wine and talking to Nathan, his older brother.

Nathan was the apple of his father’s eye. Disciplined, he’d take any risk for the family. They had all been taught that it was what they did that counted: not who they were. Nathan took to this philosophy, though Gabriel could tell Nathan didn’t enjoy it.

He could tell Nathan had no opinion on it at all. To Nathan, it was just the natural order of things. Nathan was being fought over between Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Ask him about it, and he wouldn’t act excited. Nathan was going to go into the service after that, as well. He’d be a man, not like his younger brothers who both were emotional and idealistic. No sense of realism or practicality in either of them, Arthur announced, holding his glass up in resignation.

God Bless Nathan.

Peter was his mother’s favorite. At first it was hard to tell. They were given the exact same gifts, items, and materials. The exact same chances. But when she read them bed times stories, she’d ruffle Peter’s hair after giving him a kiss on his forehead.

(One time—a time he never really wanted to think about—his father pushed his mother away from him. That one time, in the kitchen, when she wandered up behind him, touched a knife—it was just a touch. He felt guilty that his mind went there)

Gabriel didn’t want to hate Peter. It was Peter who would wake up when he was crying—scared of the dark, scared of his family, and scared of himself—and cross the divide between their two beds to hold him. It was Peter who would always save a place for him. ‘We have to wait for Gabe.’ It was Peter who talked to him like a real person, shared real feelings with him, and just…accepted him.

Like he wasn’t any problem, didn’t have any defect. He was just Gabriel to Peter.

Naturally, Gabriel counted the days when things would change between him and Peter. Lately, their relationship had started to erode. Peter knew how to talk to people and could make everyone feel as if they counted. Peter was personal and wise and calm and understanding. Never met a stranger.

Everyone was strange to Gabriel. But Peter’s attention was paramount. Gabriel could lose Peter’s attention: he’d simply cease to exist. He didn’t think he could do anything without Peter there to hold his hand and keep his secrets and never be afraid of him.

So, while his parents and siblings were distracted by the important and significant company, Gabriel sat out in the rain with the sole goal of becoming deathly ill.

Death-bed territory. His mind already conjured up a fantastic image, and he smiled, his eyes shining behind his fogged up glasses. His family, gathered around his small bed. His Superman themed blanket can’t keep the chills away. Peter held his hand, and the rest—even his father—wept. The doctor put up his kit and sadly shook his head. Gabriel would rasp and forgive them all—feebly but oh so nobly.

And then---he was splashed in the face. He sputtered, and that dirty water went right in his mouth. Bacteria. Disease. Trash. Right in his mouth.

“You killed me!” he yelled, spitting and spitting frantically.

“This is the first time I killed someone and they kept talking to me,” the girl wondered and bent down to look at him. She poked him on his cheek.

“Argh,” he replied, recoiling. Obviously the girl was being what his father called a smart-ass. She hadn’t killed anyone. She was about his age, unlucky thirteen. “Leave me alone.”

“Okay.” She sat down right besides him. Just like that fairytale. She was going to eat him, and it would really be…well, an unusual way to die.

“You’re not leaving me alone.”

“This is public property. We are on the sidewalk. Daddy says I can do whatever I want on the sidewalk.”

“Your Daddy must work at the pound for animals. I guess he let you out of your cage a day early.”

Her face was still for a blurry moment. “Uh-huh. He had to talk to your Daddy.”

OH. NO.

Gabriel’s hands clenched. Let me rephrase this. Let me start again. Uh. Uh. Let me insult you better? Uh. Uh.

“I’m sososo sorry. So sorry. Uh.”

“So you would have treated me better if you had known my Daddy pays the bills for your Daddy?”

“YES.”

She giggled and patted his head. His hair was wet so it got matted down. He felt like a dog.

“I like you. You’re twitchy.”

“Good. I’ll twitch some more if you want?” he offered, always ready to make a good impression. His father said he went about it the wrong way, but now he hoped he was getting it right.

“Why are you sitting in the rain?”

He paused, glancing over at her. For some reason, he wanted to spill his guts, tell her everything. Make a list. A-Z on Gabriel Gray.

“I was thinking about making myself sick.”

“You could die,” Elle said. “Daddy said the rain could kill you.”

“That’s the idea.”

Now she’d run away. Like the other kids in school did. It was almost a point of pride, but not quite. But just enough. Right.

“You aren’t afraid?”

He bit his lip. “…No. Not really.”

“Why do you want to die?” she asked. Who asks this, to a (im)perfect stranger? Her apparently, and she was egging him on. He, being a creature of extremes and not realizing it yet, met her head on. Okay. All right. If you must know (like he would have had to know)…

“I want to go home.”

“Home’s that way, Dorothy.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not anywhere.”

“Well, that’s weird.”

At last. Finally. It was out there, in the air. He was weird. All right. Weird, he’d be.

“What about the rest of them? Your Daddy and Mommy? Won’t they miss you if you’re dead? Mine wouldn’t.”

Okay. That tugged at something foreign in his chest but in his head, he had to top it. So, he let fly and purged.

“Mine won’t love you unless you perform perfectly. They won’t love you unless you say something completely original. The best. And they’ll show you how much they don’t need you either. They can take you or leave you, and they’ll just let you know.”

“Really? You know the whole wide world? Wow.”

In the rain, her face looked older. It was as if she knew. But of course she didn’t.

“I might as well. Everything seems so wrong. Everything here is gray.”

“You’re filthy rich, Gabriel,” Elle said, adjusting her dress.

“Let me guess, you’re going to tell me I’m an ungrateful brat and I didn’t deserve any of this.”

“No, I’m telling you to do whatever you want. Whatever will make you happy.”

“And if I don’t know what that is?”

“We could be unhappy together,” Elle offered, smiling. “And you’d never have to be perfect with me. You could be an untalented, boring little twerp.”

There was a pause.

“Too late?” he asked, sneering.

“It’s never too late for me to steal your glasses off your face, no.”

“What?” Gabriel asked, but it was too late for him to stop her from jerking his lenses off his face. With that, she jumped to her feet and ran, her little legs seeming to go a mile a minute.

“Hey!” he roared, wounded and angry. “GIVE THOSE BACK.”

Elle merely held up her hand, his poor glasses held hostage, and giggled as she ran. He jumped to his feet and ran. Several times, he almost slid. The rain hit his face like little darts, and he skidded some more. This was ridiculous and dumb and he couldn’t run ‘right’.

But he wasn’t going to let her take his glasses from him. He followed her through every twist and turn of the streets. He was determined not to let her go…he almost got run over by a car. The car’s horn blared and he held up his hands in automatic apology.

Elle kept running, her black shoes flying. And she kept laughing, her ribbons mocking him as they waved bye-bye. His knee hurt, and it felt like a splinter was inside the actual kneecap, but he wasn’t going to let her go.

They turned down a dark alley, and he reached out with his long arms and grabbed a fistful of her hair. Reeled her in.

Pushed her against the brick wall. She ‘oof’ed but then smiled at him. She had the nerve to smile at him.

He bared his teeth. She smiled brighter.

Elle folded his glasses and tucked them back into his pocket. The pocket of his khakis. Something inside of him shifted, and he realized that this was a girl. Yet she wasn’t enough of a girl to frighten him off.

“You are the mysterious one. My daddy said to keep an eye on you, not the others.”

The sensation he felt at these words, dropped like pearls from her lips, was like taking his first breath. Take a step back, Gabriel. Don’t forget the reality you can never escape.

“He meant Peter…did he mean Peter?” Gabriel stated and then asked.

“Nope. Gabriel, he said. I remember.” Suddenly her smile didn’t seem so jagged and ugly.

“I guess that means you should be friends with me instead of being mean,” he pointed out.

“Friends? Hmm…will you do what I tell you?” Elle asked, batting her eyelashes. “I mean, if you want to be friends…”

“Depends.”

“Nuh-uh,” she teased. “If you just do what I tell you, you won’t have to worry about everyone else. Think about it.”

Gabriel did, and he noticed how grimy the brick was behind her. Her blonde hair stuck to the red, and red on her blonde hair was a good look for her. But the bricks had been laid wrong. If he could just realign them…then he focused on her again, on her bright smile and blueblue eyes.

He wouldn’t have to care, really, if his father liked him as long as he had Elle. He wouldn’t have to care if anyone liked him, even Peter, as long as he had Elle.

As long as he had her.

“No tricks,” he ordered, pressing his thumb against her pulse points. “What do I have to do?”

“Be my friend.”

“That’s it?” That request was bewildering. He stepped back from her, wiping his hands on his khakis and regretting the filth on his clean clothes.

“Have you had a friend before?”

“Plenty,” Gabriel lied.

“Then you can show me how it goes,” Elle said and tapped him on the nose. He felt a bit of that odd current again.

“I…” He was about to confess his true self, but her smile stopped him. It was, again, as if she had known and that was all right. She was broken enough herself not to…now where had that thought come from? “I can try,” he said anyway, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

“You don’t have to try,” Elle said, winking. It did make a certain kind of sense. A beautiful logic. Just narrow it down to the one person and things fall into line. You can do anything, with the support of one person. He didn’t need the rest of them.

It was liberating.

He stared at her, studying her. He wanted to know all about her now.

“Let’s go back and listen in.” She took his hand and led him back, and they sat under the window and laughed at things they didn’t understand.

That was a first for him too.

***

Turned out, Elle went to their school, one of pretention and pretense.  
The perfect pre ( environment that was Catholic based. Now, if there’s one thing that Gabriel knew from a young age, it was suffering and the merits within suffering. There was something intrinsically individualistic about it, and he built his identity on…so many losses.

His money wasn’t his: and his parents had scented failure. He was (insert name’s) brother. The most puzzling thing about being a non-entity was that ability to be so hated.

Elle, in her uniform, didn’t look like a girl or a boy. Her knees were still knobby for that, her….well, she wasn’t that grown up. But she was a person to him, and that was a first too.

No one was more surprised that he was when she sat down next to him at lunch, with that smile of hers that held so much mystery and promise. Peter, he thought, was relieved, and detoured to the other table with his cafeteria tray. He made Peter feel guilty and tarnished, and that was ruining a beautiful thing…

Gabriel didn’t make Elle feel guilty, and in turn, that didn’t make him feel guilty. Though he had built himself up (upon so many losses, upon what he could never have), he didn’t miss the guilt.

No one was more surprised than him, at this fact.

They didn’t talk much at first lunchtime break (Gabriel always compared his stories to those of others and decided it wasn’t worth the time and space…it wasn’t enough, his words…) She didn’t mind, either, and he could tell that she wasn’t lying about it. Apparently, her daddy talked so much and her mother did too, and some time, some space, was too rare to pass up.

“I feel so lonely when everyone’s talking, don’t you?” she asked, several lunch times later. “It’s nice not to be lost in the noise.”

“You can feel the words like wind through a hole in your soul,” he agreed, and there was a catch that spiraled horribly. The previous sense of comfort was toppling, and he looked down at his plate.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” she whispered and hit his elbow. He didn’t mind that he almost knocked over his drink. Gabriel was in constant fear of dying of embarrassment, but that was when he was alone.

“When pieces fit, I find there isn’t as much background noise, is all,” he finished.

She moved closer against him, a perfect fit.

***

Gabriel would be the first to admit it. Elle Bishop was both his crush and his crutch.

Well, she was his crush later: he could not trivialize how he felt about her. On some levels, she scared him. In his endless fantasies that were always more elaborate and bigger than he was, there was always that scenario where he’d just leave. Up and leave, and let them talk about him for the rest of their lives.

In this fantasy, he’d see the world and find something that had never been done before. He’d live under nobody’s rules but his own. Being a missing person is more legendary than a hermit-failure, the white sheep (as it was). Even if he did nothing great, everyone would assume that he had done something great. Quick fix, with Gabriel Petrelli always on their minds even if Nathan and Peter were right in front of him.

With Elle, he didn’t think he could leave now. Not that he would, but…he couldn’t. Now. He thought once about asking her to leave with him but…

Elle existed in this sphere.

Their understanding was deep. Once, when Peter was away on a sleepover, he had confessed---to his unending horror afterwards— that he was stillslightlyalmostnotreally scared of the dark over their algebra homework. She hadn’t said a word, and he didn’t know why he had said it. Even at the time, a part of him was screaming of its irregularity.

Still he had said it, and nothing could ever take back the fact that Elle Bishop knew that he was scared of the boogeyman. (He had the best boogeyman of all, Lucifer, but that was when he was in the light, nearby people. He didn’t know where the darkness was. Inside or out)

Nothing could take away the fact that on that night, she came to him.

He had been laid there wide-awake, hating the shadows and hating himself (one of his most beloved hobbies, the foundation that would never leave him). Gabriel had always confessed his innermost secrets to Elle. It was odd: he just saw her face and he’d purge as if it were out of his control. Some aspects of his personality were frightening, he knew.

One time, a boy in the school who was an outcast made friends with Gabriel, and sensing a kindred spirit, Gabriel had reciprocated the friendship. Only…the boy was a religious freak and wanted to save his soul (a nice thought?).

To appease his friendship, Gabriel was planning on lying to his parents about being sick on Sunday and going to the other church to be baptized. He didn’t believe that church’s ideas but he had to do it now. Just because he had to, for the idea of friendship. He was quite easily impressionable at times… Elle had told him he was crazy and that he didn’t have to take that shit from anyone.

She had stood nearby when he took a shaky stand. Looking back on it, his idea to be baptized into a whole different faith to be loved was a little…over the top.

He had apologized vigorously to Elle for the trouble. She told him that he was a creature of extremes, just like her, and not to worry about it. Naturally he did worry about it, and that brought him back to the problem…

…that some aspects of himself that he had shared with her weren’t the manliest of traits either.

He always had to push too far. Finally, he had gone too far. Water under the bridge now. Now, he imagined, she’d make fun of him. All along it had been a game, most likely, and she’d laugh and laugh…he clenched his fists under his covers, seeing her laugh again and again.

In the throes of his anger, there was a tck on his window. He flinched, his overactive imagination filling in unspeakable blanks. He almost screamed when a face peered at him from outside. A face with blonde hair and those blue eyes…

“Elle,” he gasped and hurried to the window to let her in.

“You never crawled through my window, so I decide to crawl through yours,” she whispered happily. She was always bright and peppy to his cobwebs and gray.

“How’d you get past the cameras?” he asked, perplexed. She put a finger to her lips and shed, winking at him. Tomorrow he would discover that the cameras had been shorted out somehow.

“Let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about your threads…”

His Superman pajamas. Okay. No way to save his dignity now.

“I like them. They’re sexy.” She bit her lip but that meant nothing because they were clearly friends. Clearly.

“My father says I have a Peter Pan complex, and that they should be burned,” he offered, pushing. In response, she snapped the elastic bands of his pajamas, and he took the Lord’s name in vain.

She tsked at him and crawled in his bed. She was wearing jeans, and he watched her take of her shoes.

“Do you mind? Or do you want me in your brother’s bed?”

She was thirteen, he was fourteen. Elle flirted with the idea but they were friends.

“With me.”

Because they were friends. She was gone in the morning, but he held the memory of her besides him.

Someone had risked getting in trouble for him.

For him.

That might have been when he fell in love with her.

***

Elle fell in love with Peter when he helped Gabriel.

That was the irony of it. And there was more. Elle had started to fight.

McGregor was this big time football player who had been stalking Elle. Gabriel didn’t like him around, so when Elle told him to pretend that they were going out, he was happy to do it.

“Ask me to the prom in front of his face, okay. Nice and loud,” she said at lunch, as if this was all harmless fun.

“If I ask, you might have to go with me,” he warned her.

“That stupid thing…sure, why not? It’s better than being at home,” she said, taking a sip of her coke.

He had a warm feeling in his chest the rest of the day…until the actual deed. Like Elle had ordered him to do, he stopped by her locker, fiddling with the strap of his bag with a strange nervousness, and asked her to the prom.

McGregor didn’t take this well. When Elle chirped a cheerful ‘why yes, of course, I’d love to go with you, Gabriel’, he had burst out laughing. Well. Gabriel had grown more realistic with age, or so he liked to think. He was willing to let it go. He had Elle, and that’s all he needed.

But Elle grabbed his collar and told him what to say to McGregor. Riding on a high on the thought of Elle dancing with him, Gabriel obeyed and said some choice things about his sick baby sister.

One small problem: he hadn’t known his sister was really sick (terminally ill, in fact). He had been surprised by how still and dark McGregor had gotten… until Elle informed him with a wink after certain choice words could not be taken back. (Of course, Elle would never have been so cruel. There must be a misunderstanding…of course.)

He should have known the ambush, seen it coming a mile away. But Elle was by his side, talking to him and at the exact moment he realized how much of a desirable woman she had become, he was spitting out blood and possibly several teeth.

All he heard was his bones breaking and Elle screaming and McGregor cussing him out through tears of hate and anger…

Despite his moments of inflicting pain upon himself, Gabriel hadn’t been raised to endure such physical pain.

“Get off him, you’re killing him!”

Vaguely, he agreed. McGregor yelped in surprise at some shock, but it was Peter’s voice that called him back to consciousness. His cheek was on the burning hot asphalt and he tasted sticky and sweet blood, and his mouth felt loose.

There was glass in his left eye. He couldn’t help it. He started to cry (and that hurt even worse), and Peter’s arms were around him, supporting him.

“I’m blind, in my eye, I’m blind,” he wept.

“Shh, shh, no, you’re not. You’re going to be fine. I’ve got you,” Peter told him, and Gabriel knew this was true. It took him back to being brothers with him and how Peter always took up for him.

With Peter supporting him from one side and Elle, the other, he felt cradled and loved (and maybe being blind in one eye…wait he wouldn’t be able to see the clocks that he was working on and they’d feel abandoned)…then he started to cry again.

He missed the look shared between his brother and his only friend.

While he was in the hospital, they were kind enough to swing by to visit him before they went to the prom. Together.

…

Isn’t that special?

***

In the haze of healing, Gabriel thought about suicide.

He’d write a note to Elle, telling her about his love for her, and she’d be sorry when he was gone. She’d be sorry the rest of her life for how she had treated him. He saw her crying her heart out and flinch away from Peter…

But he knew Peter. He’d say all the right things and they’d be more in love than ever.

Probably more in love than ever.

Then there was the burning in hell for all of eternity aspect…that he could deal with. He was in hell now.

He thought about having someone kill him. The same result occurred, Peter and Elle closer than ever. This was infuriating because there was no answer. His many plans of revenge always ended badly for him and wonderfully for them.

The treacherous monsters that they were.

If only they knew what they had done to him…they did know what they had done to him. His mother would visit him and report all the good news. Elle and Peter were getting along so wonderfully that her father was considering forgetting the bad feelings between families. This could only be good for the Petrellis.

She watched him carefully. He smiled at her and told her how happy he was for them. And for the family.

She kissed his forehead. She didn’t believe him.

It didn’t matter. What could he do?

***

They announced their engagement at Christmas.

No one looked at the baby bump clearly showing underneath her pretty new dress except for Gabriel. So. That marked off killing Elle. There were so many ways he could use that to his advantage, but it was a baby and it was his nephew.

He had to leave after his mother had hugged Peter (after his father had clapped him on the shoulder).

He walked quickly into the garden, even though it was freezing. He had nothing holding him back from leaving now. But now that he couldn’t have her, he had never wanted her more. In his mind, he assaulted her and had her with his brother’s child just between them.

It was never enough.

“I haven’t seen you around lately.”

Gabriel stiffened and took a sip of more of his wine. He could hardly talk to her. She placed a hand on his back.

“I’m glad we’re going to be family, you know. I owe your mother for a favor when I was a kid…she talked my dad out of testing me so young. And you were always like a little brother to me.”

It wasn’t even the brother part that got to him. It was the ‘little’ part.

“Me too,” he turned around with a big smile and he hugged her tightly. There was a space between them that could never be undone. He made sure not to hold her too long. “You were always like a sister to me.”

He couldn’t read her expression.

“Daddy says that when you both manifest, you and Peter could both run the Company.”

Peter would manifest first. This, he already knew.

“Maybe,” he said, still smiling. “The future is so bright for you two.”

“And you,” she added, holding on to his arms. “Hey, if you’re Peter’s best man at my wedding, we could return the favor for yours someday.”

He let her go quickly.

“Father’s got me doing something for the Company that week,” he said. Despite Arthur’s indifference towards him, his father wasn’t entirely heartless.

He had offered a small errand that week, and Gabriel had seized the opportunity with slavish gratitude.

“We’ll get the ceremony on video for you.”

The way she said it…

“It’s cold out here. I’m going inside.”

This time, she didn’t follow him.

***

Gabriel missed his flight. The idea had hit him while he was thinking about children on the way to the airport. To raise a family, a man had to really be a man. Had to do whatever was necessary to protect his family.

He wasn’t even plotting for their destruction. He was just imagining Peter as a man who wouldn’t do what was necessary. He would. If only there was a way to prove to Elle…

And it hit him. The obvious solution hit him. He yelled for the taxi driver to stop with such religious conviction that the man didn’t dare tell him off. He tipped him extra and stepped back out into the world.

If Peter passed this test, then he would let it go…and simply take himself out of the picture.

If not, Elle would see what she almost missed.

***

“I’m really proud of you, you know,” Peter said on the ride over, and for a moment, he almost called it off. He didn’t know now, whether he should have or not.

“For what? I’m just giving you guys some quality time alone away from the family. It’s nothing you don’t deserve.”

“I thought you…I thought you didn’t like the idea of us together,” Peter confessed. “You’re my brother first. And I didn’t know how-.”

“It’s behind us. Don’t apologize now. You two deserve each other.”

He should stop using the word deserved. It was foolish, to reveal too much. At three o clock in the morning, however, things usually had a way of staying hidden.

Peter only smiled at him with love, and he smiled back.

With love, too. Why else would he be doing this?

***

They spotted Elle at the edge of the park, underneath the light.

She looked beautiful. It might have been the effect of motherhood, but she really was lovely. Angelic, even.

Peter opened his mouth, possibly to voice what Gabriel had been thinking when the man stepped out of the shadows with a knife. Quick as a flash, he had the knife to Elle’s throat. Her eyes were all fear and horror. She couldn’t use her electricity to fight him off, not with the baby inside of her.

He had expected more pleasure at the sight of her fear but oddly enough, his heart started to beat faster. (Even though he knew this was all smoke and mirrors). The knife was retractable: it was a party favor.

What the bum didn’t know was that he had a gun in his pocket.

“Elle!” Peter screamed. “Hey, you let go off her.”

As scripted, the bum shook his head and pushed the knife closer to her neck. With that, Gabriel stepped up behind Peter and whispered, “I have a gun. But that is your child, and that is your future wife.”

He slipped the gun into Peter’s hand.

“I’m going to kill this bimbo just for fun, you fuck,” the bum said and laughed. Gabriel hated vulgarity, and so he winced slightly. Elle’s eyes started to shine with tears.

“I can’t, I…”

Gabriel stood behind, watching this scene unfold. Elle’s eyes had spotted the gun before the bum had. Gabriel had left out the detail about the gun when making the deal with the man. He wanted it to look authentic.

Her eyes sought Peter’s, begging him to help her.

“If you won’t, I will.”

Just as planned. There were blanks in the gun. It was so simple. It was pointless to kill a bum and he hadn’t wanted Elle to get hurt. He reached for the gun but to his surprise…

Peter took the shot.

Two things happened at once, or at least, in close succession. The bum grabbed his chest. For one wild moment, Gabriel thought there had been real bullets in that gun, but as it was, the man was having a heart-attack out of fear and surprise at the sight of being shot at.

And Elle collapsed, clutching her side. There was blood quickly appearing on her dress.

…

A piece of metal had been loose in the gun. It had acted as a bullet in its own right…and it had hit the only person Gabriel had ever loved.

***

Two birds, one stone.

The bum had died, unable to be revived. Gabriel never bothered to learn his name. But Peter had believed he had killed him, and at that moment, he had manifested his empathetic potential and the death in front of him had made him unstable.

His mother had taken him away, off to some isolated place where Peter could heal from the shock of the overflow of feeling and pain and fear. That’s where Nathan mostly was too, working with his broken, beloved brother.

Elle hadn’t lost the baby but it had taken weeks for her to get back on her feet again. It had missed a vital artery by an inch. Gabriel had gotten away with it…

But his mind wouldn’t let him. He had destroyed Peter, and had almost killed a baby. He had gotten a man killed, who was innocent although worthless…

It was just him and his father in the house, and Arthur had confided in him that if Peter didn’t get better, he’d have to take Peter’s place by his side.

For some reason, Gabriel wasn’t so happy anymore. The nightmares were enough where he saw her fall to her feet again and again. Saw Peter scream again and again. Saw the clear ‘snap’ behind his eyes as Gabriel shook him, spewing apologies.

He spent most of his time in church.

***

“I knew I’d find you here.”

Gabriel closed his eyes, blocking the picture of the mosaic from his sight. “Elle. Are you feeling better?”

“Depends. Do you have anyone hired to scare the hell out of me this time?”

His heart stopped. “How’d you know?”

“You just told me.”

Gabriel couldn’t move. He couldn’t run away. And he still couldn’t look at her. “Have you told father yet?”

“No. Not yet,” she said, sounding cheerful. “I wanted you all to myself.”

“…I’ll take whatever you want to do to me.”

He heard her heels on the stone and felt her sit besides him with a child she could have lost.

“I’m flattered. But I want to know something first. Why did you pull that stunt?”

“I wanted to show you I’d kill for you. I’d protect you no matter what. I wanted you to see that Peter…would never do that for you.”

“Except he totally did. You underestimated him, Gabriel.”

“I did.” He kept his eyes closed. She ran a hand through his hair, and he shuddered. ‘Sorry’ seemed like it wouldn’t be enough.

“And I overestimated him,” she mused. At that, he opened his eyes. She was staring at him appreciatively. “You would have loaded that thing with real bullets if I hadn’t been in the way. You would have taken the shot too.”

“Yes,” he said, mournfully. “But I didn’t. The past doesn’t matter now. Only the present.”

“Presently, Peter has lost his mind. You haven’t…even after what you’ve done.”

“I’m not far behind,” he admitted, but there was an odd feeling bubbling up inside of him. Something like hope.

“If you do that, I’d lose husband number two and where would that leave me? With Nathan, that’s who, and we don’t click.”

Gabriel didn’t believe her, but she grabbed his hand and squeezed it…lovingly. “You’d pull a depraved stunt like that for me. How could I not…appreciate the gesture?”

“You…”

“I was waiting for you to do something. To show that I meant more to you than blood. Daddy was right. You will go places, if I have anything to say about it.”

She smiled at him and leaned forward. Kissing her was like breathing for the first time.

He couldn’t believe it; that didn’t matter. She was his. The spark hit him as a surprise, and he tasted blood. He blinked in surprise.

“But try it again and I’ll kill you,” she said. All light and brightness.

“Don’t make me have to and I won’t,” he growled back and reclaimed her lips. She kissed him back eagerly, making a sound in the back of her throat.

It seemed they had reached an understanding. In a month, they were husband and wife, and ready to start a family.

***

Before their wedding, they took the time to pay Peter a visit. He seemed to be able to form more than two syllables now.

Isn't that special?


End file.
